iOS 18's new Clean Up tool shows Apple is still way behind the Google Pixel's AI photo tricks

Apple’s new iOS 18 developer beta contains an artificial intelligence (AI) feature called Clean Up, which uses machine learning wizardry to remove elements from your photos and tidy them up. If you think that sounds a lot like Google's Magic Eraser, you'd be right – but some early test-runs show that iPhones are still playing catchup with their Pixel rivals.

To use the Clean Up feature, you need to have downloaded iOS 18.1 beta 3 onto your iPhone. Once that’s done, open the Photos app, pick a picture and start editing it, whereupon you’ll see a new Clean Up button. The feature suggests elements that could be removed from the picture, or you can draw over an object with your finger and Clean Up will get to work.

The problem is that the results are, in the early beta at least, somewhat hit and miss. While Clean Up appears to do a decent job of removing objects, it struggles to convincingly fill in the blanks that are left once the selected object is gone – something that a @sondesix comparison thread on X (formerly Twitter) illustrates quite nicely.

Compare that to Google Photos , which also has its own AI-powered image cleanup tool called Magic Editor alongside Magic Eraser. This is also good at isolating and removing objects from images, but right now it appears to do a better job of replacing the removed item with realistic AI-generated content.

Unlike Apple’s Clean Up tool (which works completely on-device), Magic Editor also lets you choose from several different results, allowing you to pick the best one and not just have to rely on a single AI-created outcome.

Apple is playing catch-up

With Apple’s Clean Up tool clearly a few steps behind competitors from Google and others, it’s tempting to ask whether other Apple Intelligence features are up to snuff. Having tried a few of them myself ( mostly on macOS , admittedly), I can say that Apple Intelligence is a bit of a mixed bag at the moment, with some features impressing while others are underwhelming – or not yet available.

This is all uncharted territory for Apple, so it’s not surprising to see it trying to find its feet. We shouldn’t be too harsh on Clean Up, since it is still in beta and could see some significant improvements over the coming weeks and months.

We’ve seen reports that many Apple Intelligence features could be delayed into the new year , so we shouldn’t be too shocked to see one of them (Clean Up) needing a bit more work before it’s ready. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has also suggested that Clean Up could even be given a 'beta' label in the Photos app, to start with.

At the same time, Apple has said that most of its Apple Intelligence features are performed on-device, meaning your information is not sent to Apple’s servers. That’s much better for your privacy compared to rival services, but it could limit the abilities of features like Clean Up and perhaps goes some way to explaining why it’s a little behind its rivals.

Or it could simply be because Apple needs to catch up on rivals like Google, which has been developing AI features like this for years. Whatever the case, we’ll find out over the next few months and years whether Apple can close the gap and improve its AI tools, all while preserving user privacy.

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